To say a movie is a love letter to a city is probably common enough now that it might even be a cliché, but with Valentine’s Day here, indulge me for a moment while I at least begin to describe All We Imagine as Light in that way. The movie takes place in Mumbai, with all its teeming masses, its colors, its sounds, and its smells, as we follow two hospital nurses and their lives in the city. The two are roommates: one of them young and a little more modern than some people might be used to, the other older, not quite middle-aged, with sad eyes and a view of her own personal affairs that might hew a little too close to convention. The young woman is in love with a young Muslim man but must keep it a secret, because what would people think? The older woman is married to a man she never really knew, a man she hadn’t met before their wedding who then left a few days later for a job in Germany.
Like the best movies of this kind, and this is one of the best movies of this kind, the film is not entirely starry-eyed about what its city is—we don’t see Mumbai’s darkest recesses, but we do understand it can be difficult for people, and especially women, and that the movie is able to tell such an intimate story while also helping us feel the rushing vastness of a city of 12.5 million people is kind of a small miracle. And that director Payal Kapadia is able to do it all with such a gentle hand is even more impressive—we often feel as if we’re lightly skipping along the story, dipping in here and there as we see these women’s lives. A playful piano score carries us along the air, and the movie’s sound design is astonishing, with sounds of the rain, fragments of overheard conversations, and the cacophony of the city even during the quietest moments.
Kapadia seems fascinated by the ways people communicate with each other—her first feature, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, was almost an epistolary film, and here we find people relating to each other through their words, texting, a poem, their eyes, love notes scribbled on a cave wall, and kind gestures. We hear half a dozen different languages just within the first couple minutes of the film, a man struggles to learn Hindi, and a woman tries to call her husband only to be confronted with an automated message that means nothing to her.
I said Nickel Boys was the best movie of 2024, but while that’s clearly true, All We Imagine as Light may have been my favorite of the year.
All We Imagine as Light is available on VOD.
